Articles

Recent years have seen an exciting and motivating new rise of the women's movement starting in Argentina and including major mobilisations against violence in India, the anti-Trump mobilisations in the US and elsewhere in January 2017, the #metoo movement world wide, #Ele Nao! in Brazil, the mass women's strike in the Spanish state in 2018 and 2019…

In March 2011 we were honoured by a visit from the new Cuban Ambassador to The Netherlands, Zelmys María Dominguez Cortina. The ambassador met with IIRE Executive Director Marijke Colle, former directors Susan Caldwell and Antonio Carmona Báez, IIRE Fellow James Cockcroft and a delegation from IIRE Manila.

The staff and friends of the IIRE were saddened to hear about the sudden death of Chris Harman on the evening of 6 November, in Cairo, where he was giving a talk.

A towering figure of the left in Europe, Harman was a pillar of the British revolutionary, anti-capitalist organisation, the Socialist Workers Party, and editor of the journal International Socialism. His monumental work A People’s History of the World, published in 1999, represented the first attempt to provide a single bottom-up account of the development of human civilisation.

It may be useful to assess the dangers of the systematically hostile attitude of the overwhelming majority of major European and North American media companies in relation to the current events taking place in Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela. This hostility is only matched by an embarrassed, complicit silence with regard to those involved in the putsch in Honduras or the repression enacted by the Peruvian army against the indigenous populations of the Amazon. In order to demonstrate this statement, here are a few recent facts:

The military coup currently underway in Honduras is a hard coup accompanied by various vain attempts to make it appear soft and "constitutionalist." Behind the coup are diverse social, economic, and political forces, of which the most important is the administration of President Barack Obama. No important change can happen in Honduras without Washington's approval. The Honduran oligarchy and transnational corporations (banana growers, pharmaceutical manufacturers) are defending their interests, as they always have, with a military coup.

In Latin America, if we exclude Cuba, we can point to three general categories of governments. First, the governments of the right, the allies of Washington, that play an active role in the region and occupy a strategic position: these are the governments of Álvaro Uribe in Colombia, Alan García in Peru and Felipe Calderón in México.